These perceptions had been established long before he’d ever actually laid eyes on her, for it was Madame Celli with whom he’d been in correspondence since he was first informed that his fellowship had been granted. Well, correspondence. On his part thoughtful, practical letters asking thoughtful, practical questions— the weather one could expect in April, what forwarding address he should leave for his friends, the advisability of renting a car, if there was a dress code. And, on hers, in a charming, unexpected, quite witty English, only the salutation written in ink at the top, form letters, hospitable, boilerplate responses to inquiries he had no doubt she could reproduce in Spanish, or French, or Italian, or German, or in almost every EC language any of those one or two staggered, twice-weekly arriving birds of a month’s passage might throw at her. Which only added insult to the injury of Miller’s fatigue and took a little of the shine off his having been selected or, if not exactly selected, then at least approved by the Foundation. Which, too, was why he was so touched by Madame’s routine boilerplate courtesy to his simple request that she permit him to leave his things in the lobby while he lumbered off without having to lug along the additional burden of thirty or so pounds of cumbersome luggage. It seemed a sort of relenting. She was, after all, mistress here, empowered, he didn’t in the least doubt, by the Foundation with all the authority of a ship’s captain, say, at once hostess, concierge, enforcer, and housemother. It was she, after all, who had assigned him to an outbuilding rather than to a room in what he had already come to think of as the administration building.
Scraping favor, he asked, in as close an approximation to French as he could muster, just where, exactly, he was headed.
“Vous voulez dire, monsieur?”
It wasn’t the first time he had failed to make himself understood.
“I guess none of you people has had the benefit of the first term-and-a-half of freshman-year French,” Miller said, and repeated his question in English.
Madame led him outside and pointed out the yellow house to him.
But if Monsieur was to freshen up wouldn’t he be needing some of his toilet articles out of his valise?
“It’s a done deal. I’ve got it covered,” Monsieur said and, feeling like a fool, but unwilling to go back into the lobby with her or to squat down over his suitcase rummaging through its contents while she watched, held up his laptop word processor.
There were only four rooms. Number 22 was to the left at the top of a flight of red brick steps at the rear of the small ground-floor hallway, and the key, it turned out, was just to his room, not to the house itself. The house could not be locked and, indeed, the other three rooms were either entirely or partially open to the gaze of anyone — Miller, for example — who cared to look in. In fact, it was only the door to Miller’s room, warped, stuck shut in the Provençal heat, that was closed at all.
He saw that it had no toilet and would have called Madame but he saw that it had no phone either.
Some Foundation, Miller thought, some big fucking deal Foundation! Some big goddamned honor having them approve my project! Had to pay my own damn airfare! And some Madame Celli while we’re at it! Big linguist! Some witty, charming command of the English fucking language she must have! Doesn’t even know “freshen up” is the idiom for having to take a piss! Yeah, well. She even said that about needing my toilet articles out of my valise. Yeah, well, he thought, that’s probably the idiom around here for go piss in your suitcase.
But really, he thought, a month? A month in Arles?
He shouldn’t have listened to her, Miller thought, he should have rented a car.
And he was sore. Well, disappointed. No, he thought, sore. Sore and disappointed. If it had been beautiful. Or in important mountains instead of a sort of clearing among distant minor hills. Or on the sea instead of better than twenty-five miles away from it. What was it? From first impressions, and Miller was one who put a lot of stock in first impressions, it seemed to him to be a kind of gussied-up country market town with a faint suggestion — its long stone railroad trestle that traced one edge of the town like a sooty rampart, its several dubious hotels, bars, and workingmen’s restaurants, the gloomy bus station and cluster of motorcycle agencies, bicycle-repair shops, and, everywhere, on the sides of buildings, on kiosks and hoardings, on obsolete confetti of dated posters for departed circuses, stock-car races, wrestling matches; even the small municipal park with its benchloads of provocative, heavily made-up teenagers in micros and minis, their clumsily leathered attendants who looked more like their pimps than their boyfriends — of light, vaguely compromised industry. What was it? Well, frankly, at first blush, it might almost have been an older, downsized, more rural sort of Indianapolis.
This was his impression anyway and, though he’d keep an open mind (Miller hadn’t many illusions about himself and pretty much had his own number— a fellow of only slightly better-than-average luck and intelligence, an over- achiever actually, who had pretty much gone the distance on what were, after all, rather thin gifts, even his famous “selection” more a tribute to his connected Indianapolis pals and colleagues who’d vouched for him, written him his letters of recommendation, than to the brilliance of his project), he knew it was going to be a long month. (Unless it was to be one of those bonding deals — boy meets girl, or fate, or somesuch under disagreeable circumstances and, by degrees, through the thick and thin of stuff, ultimately comes to embrace or understand what he’d hitherto scorned).
Still, Miller, though he’d finally discovered the common toilet and shower (a tiny room on the ground floor just to the right of the stairway that he’d mistaken for a closet), felt he’d every right to be uncomfortable. He was not a good traveler, had no genius for its stresses, for dealing with the money, the alien bath fixtures, the foreign menus that turned meals into a kind of blindman’s buff; all the obligations one was under in another country, to drink the local wines, buy the local laces and silks and blown glass, honor- bound not to miss anything, to feel what the travel guides told him to feel, to see all the points of interest, but fearful of being suckered in taxis and hotels and never understanding how the natives managed. Missing nuance, sacrificing ease and the great comfort of knowing one’s place.
This room, for example, which (though he’d seen and admired the painting at the Art Institute in Chicago perhaps a half-dozen times) he still didn’t really recognize (and so, for that matter, didn’t experience even the least sense of déjà vu) as Van Gogh’s bedroom at Arles and which, even after the reality of where he was staying was confirmed, he still wouldn’t entirely believe, attributing the undeniable correspondences between the room and its furnishings to some sort of knockoff, a trick on the tourists. (Which wasn’t logical, Russell would argue, Miller being a guest of the Foundation. What could possibly be in it for them? Where was the profit?)